Bears president Ted Phillips said Smith will keep his job. If the new GM had said that, fine. At least he would’ve been the one making the decision.

But here, the new guy has no choice. He gets to be the GM, but not really. Not completely. The Bears will look for a GM who doesn’t want all the GM authority.

Just when you thought the Bears were moving forward . . .

Phillips fired Angelo and ordered Smith retained because he determined the Bears’ failure this season and the four playoff-less years in the last five was because of a lack of talent, not the coaching of that talent.

Well, maybe it was because of some of the coaching, because it feels as if Smith got to keep his job if he took away Mike Martz’s. Done.

Now, Phillips will conduct the search for a new GM instead of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a search firm to bring him a guy who can’t draft.

Phillips said he will lean toward a candidate with a talent evaluation background and “who understands Lovie’s philosophy.’’

That’s not how you do it. That’s not the way you bring in a GM. You bring in a GM because he has a winning philosophy and then let him hire people who can execute that philosophy into championships. It’s his vision, not the head coach’s.

Except when it comes to the Bears. Of course.

How can the Bears run their football business so different from the rest of their business structure? Bears chairman George McCaskey delineated the Bears’ structure like this: chairman, president/CEO, GM, coach. Standard top-down rules.

But here, the bottom of that chain is doing the dictating because someone in the middle of that structure said so.

Phillips declared that Smith is the right coach for the Bears. Just make him the GM then. They’re making this hire around Smith and apparently for him anyway.